The director of the controversial new Donald Trump biopic taunted the embattled ex-president after Trump threatened to sue the makers over the contents of their film, RadarOnline.com can report.
In the latest development to come after Ali Abbasi’s movie The Apprenticepremiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival on Monday, the director sat down for a press conference regarding the Trump biopic.
But no sooner did the press conference start that one reporter asked about the ex-president’s lawsuit threat – particularly after The Apprentice depicted Trump raping his first wife, Ivana Trump, in the 1980s.
“It’s all over the news today that the Trump Organization is threatening with a lawsuit against the film,” Variety’s Gunnar Rhelin asked Abbasi shortly after The Apprentice premiered at Cannes on Monday. “Could anyone comment on that?”
“I mean, everybody talks about him suing a lot of people,” the director quipped in response. “They don’t talk about his success rate though.”
“If I was him,” Abbasi continued, “I would be sitting in New Jersey, Florida, or wherever he is now, New York, and I would be thinking: Oh, this crazy random guy and some liberal c---- in Cannes, they gathered and they did this movie and it’s f----- up and it’s a conspiracy.”
Also surprising was Abbasi’s belief that Trump would “not necessarily dislike” The Apprentice – even though the film did depict the ex-president raping his now-deceased first wife.
“I don’t necessarily think that this is a movie that he would dislike,” the director explained. “I don’t necessarily think he would like it. I think that he would be surprised.”
“I would offer to go and meet him wherever he wants and then talk about the context of the movie, have a screening, and have a chat afterward,” Abbasi continued. “If that’s interesting for any one of the Trump campaign people here.”
As RadarOnline.com previously reported, The Apprentice was met with an eight-minute standing ovation after it premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival on Monday.
The biopic, which stars actor Sebastian Stan as a young Donald Trump and actress Maria Bakalova as a young Ivana Trump – focused on the ex-president’s life in the 1980s and his professional relationship with mentor and political fixer Roy Cohn.
But no sooner did The Apprentice premiere this week that Trump’s 2024 campaign threatened to sue Abbasi and the other filmmakers behind the new biopic.
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“We will be filing a lawsuit to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers,” Trump’s campaign spokesperson, Steven Cheung, said in a statement this week. “This garbage is pure fiction which sensationalizes lies that have been long debunked.”
“As with the illegal Biden Trials,” Cheung continued, “this is election interference by Hollywood elites who know that President Trump will retake the White House and beat their candidate of choice because nothing they have done has worked.”
Billionaire Dan Snyder, who reportedly invested heavily in the new film, was also said to be unhappy about how the young Donald Trump was portrayed in the biopic.
Snyder, a longtime ally of the embattled ex-president, reportedly demanded that the controversial rape scene involving Stan’s Trump and Bakalova’s Ivana be cut from the film before its Cannes premiere. It was not.